The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  Mostly, however, it works quite well. Besides, if you are not a “local,” some sacrifices must be made. You are free to camp near the fishery or work out little innovations with cheap motels or indulgent friends. If you take this latter course, plan to have plenty of time at your disposal; after arranging all the food, shelter, and transportation, you’ll have little time left for fishing. It is easily possible to get in sixty hours of angling in a week of fishing from a lodge or fishing hotel. It takes twice as long to get in the same amount of fishing if you are looking after yourself. Yet both options have their charms and place, and I’d never give up either one. It must be said, though, that it is nearly impossible for the out-of-towner to make much of a hand at Atlantic salmon fishing without lodgelike arrangements. While that is still possible in steelheading, it remains to be seen if the fish themselves can survive these democratic times. Certainly one sees little on steelhead rivers of the patrician ways noted on Atlantic salmon fisheries. In fact, only with the recent advent of double-handed rods have tony sport trappings heretofore unknown among steelheaders become apparent: single malt Scotch, good cigars, tweed caps, and the somewhat random use of the word “heritage.” And it is a great relief when these high-falutin’ new steelheaders continue to fracture the English language in their customary way, referring to MacAllan whiskey, for example, as “some good shit.” And when the Number Six Ring Gauge Upmanns are unavailable, the Lucky Strikes will do quite nicely, thank you.

  The final type, a derivative of one already described under Atlantic salmon, and the classification to which I ardently aspire, is the roaming sponge. This angler, grinning, obsequious, excessively convivial, seems too stupid to have a plan. Sleeping in or next to the vehicle in which he arrived, he cuts such an unarresting figure that he has bored in past the ejection level before the locals are on to his game. Too late, they realize he has increased the pressure on their favorite water. I feel it’s the duty of the roaming sponge to make up for this to his hosts, especially in good works of river conservation. Consider it a form of life insurance. The sponge must acknowledge his indebtedness and work hard to pay it off. Only when he himself becomes the target of continuous sponging can he be said to have arrived.

  However you accomplish it, every salmon, steelhead, or sea trout river you manage to get under your belt is something to be treasured. Obviously, it may be neccessary to put self-esteem to one side or to give remarkably inaccurate impressions of your character to people whom you like. A private agony may ensue—indeed may haunt your old age—but it gets you on the water.

  Wesley’s River

  RECENTLY, and among people we didn’t know that well, my eleven-year-old daughter said something that made jaws drop. Having heard the phrase “the F-word,” possibly from a potty-mouthed sibling, and assuming in our house that it must mean fishing, she told a group of guests, “All my dad cares about is the F-word.” In the astonished silence that followed this showstopper, she added, “When he’s not doing it, he’s reading about it.”

  Well, it’s true, but I don’t like every kind of it, and some of the latest forms of trout fishing as applied in my home state of Montana make me loath to bump into any of its practitioners for fear I will again see the tall man on the banks of Poindexter Slough who was tinting his neutral-colored flies with Magic Markers to match the mayflies rising around him. There’s always some little rivulet no one else wants: a brushy bend, a pond back from the road under wild apple trees. Go there.

  This summer I jumped at the chance to escape the latest techedout fly-fishing with its whirring splitshot, 7X leaders, and transitional subaqueous lifeforms imitated in experimental carpet fibers. I spent a week in a portageur canoe with Wesley Harrison who was guiding for his fifty-third year on the Grand Cascapedia River of Quebec. A portageur canoe, which is what Wesley called it, “Not a Bonaventure and not a Gaspé,” is a broad-bottomed and commodious rivercraft big enough to carry nets and rain gear, light enough to be driven by a small outboard, and lithe enough to slip along quietly in the river from drop to drop, as the precise settings of the killick or anchor are called. This task calls for a bowman, in this case a cheerful young Canadian named Jeff, who deferentially helped Wesley move the boat through its daylong ballet on the rapids and meanders of the great river.

  I was warned that if I did not fish seriously the entire time that we were on the river, if I repeatedly misstruck fish or failed to turn over my leader in the wind, Wesley would return to shore and put me off the boat. He has taken more than one sport in early with the recommendation that he go elsewhere to learn to fish before coming back. I was tuned up by such admonitions forty years ago on the Pere Marquette River by my father and my “uncle” Ben Ruhl, and there was a certain solace in having the majesty of a great river presumed as a place of seriousness, if not solemnity. These men grew up before the advent of Jet Skis and other entertainment doodads of this dubious age. The river was your great wife and the very hem of her skirt must be honored.

  I rose from bed in the wonderful music of birds in the forest surrounding the camp. To my western ears, the sliding notes of the redstart made a summery mystery. I thought of the warm haze in the skies, the nearness of the sea, the plain thrill of fishing for strong North Atlantic ocean fish whose legend required their seasonal presence in what otherwise was a woodland trout stream. The mind of an angler is stretched to account for this.

  I had breakfast with my hosts, who took very good care of me with homemade pastries and jams, tawny local bacon and farm eggs. I gathered my rod and sweater, a book of low-water salmon flies on Patridge Wilson-style hooks, some hard candy to suck on at tense moments, then walked across fields of wild strawberries swept by a warm, balsamic breeze. My only fears were that I would be struck by lightning or that news of a world war would come over the little radio in the kitchen or that Wesley would kick me out of the canoe.

  Whereupon, I met the man himself and his bowman, Jeff. Wesley Harrison was a tall, strongly made, and cheerful man in his seventies, flannel sleeves rolled over arms that had poled his canoe thousands of miles. Jeff was that rare, quick-witted youngster without a phony bone in his body. He kept one eye on Wesley to be sure of the right syncopation of effort.

  The river was a little dark and I mentioned this to Wesley. He shook his head faintly. “Not good,” he said. “The old Indian calls this poison water.” We pushed off and started the motor. Sitting in the middle of the canoe, I rested my fingertips on the fly rod I’d laid across the thwarts. I kept one eye on the unscrolling river behind and one on Wesley, whose billed cap shifted left and right as he sized up our course.

  We passed another canoe with two Mic Mac Indians guiding a well-dressed sport who failed to acknowledge our passing. “Oh, that old Indian feller there now,” said Wesley, “he’s quite comical. I asked him yesterday if they were catching anything and he called out, ‘Nothing! Fisherman no good!’ He’s a comical one, that one.”

  Wesley shut the engine off and tilted it on the narrow transom. Then he grasped the paddle and, finning it skillfully alongside the ribbed hull, eased us silently downstream to the head of a long pool. “Let ’er go, Jeff,” and our bowman dropped the iron.

  The canoe settled into a stop as the Grand Cascapedia whispered past the hull. “No shipwrecks with a lad like Jeff,” said Wesley. He thought for a moment. “If we drowned, poor old Jeff’s girlfriend would be running up and down the riverbank crying her heart out.” Jeff was gazing at the sky and I got the feeling this had been going on for a while. Then, to me: “We’ll fish this one to the right.”

  I thought of my host’s father sitting one previous evening deep in a chair on the screened porch above the river, reciting Izaak Walton: “When the sun is bright and the moon is right, the fish will bite. Maybe.” And the great proverb of my Celtic forebears: “It’s better to be lucky than to rise early.” All sorts of things run through your mind when you look at new water, especially great new water with all its manifold concealments and prospe
cts. This really was a fine pool, cut out of stone and the roots of old trees, with a long, deep run trembling down its center. The water was tea-dark from alder stain but clearing rapidly.

  I cast my fly, a Green Highlander, in widening arcs, extending one arm’s length of line per cast until I’d reached my longest distance, all under Wesley’s hawklike gaze. I reeled up, thus signaling Wesley to resume his crouch at the gunwale with his paddle and Jeff to lift the killick, as we moved to the next drop. The current here was different and Wesley kept his paddle in the water to control the yaw of the canoe.

  We resumed conversation. I had, for example, noticed a small valley that stood at an angle to the river. “Oh, a tough life there,” said Wesley, “more mealtimes than meals.” I murmured—I thought compassionately—but did catch a glint in Wesley’s eye. “There’s an old feller up there so poor he has to take his dog down to the gate in a wheelbarrow to bark at strangers.”

  While I burned a hole in the river looking for a moving shape under my fly, Wesley told me about a Frenchman who lived nearby, a high-spirited man whose wife had twins. When Wesley inquired after the babies, the Frenchman replied in a heavy accent as imitated by Wesley, “Oh, they’re cute little things but they’re an awful bother.”

  I fished this drop very slowly, thinking we were in the heart of the matter. Every so often, a seagull flew overhead reminding me of the ocean not so far away but somehow unimaginable in this beautiful sweetwater stream. At the bottom of the pool, the river went through a cleft in the rock and I thought that must be the end of it. Wesley stared at the pool as my line moved on top of the current. “What’s the matter, Mr. Salmon? A hot day like this, we’ll put you in the cooler and save you the trouble of swimming all the way upstream.”

  We discussed life in Cascapedia, a small place which, like all places, had most of the world’s problems, even drugs. “Fine young fellers,” said Wesley, “good fellers get on these drugs. Couple of months they look like they crawled through a knothole.” And, of course, nature: “The Old Indian says the hummingbird goes south by getting into the feathers of the wild goose.” He looked at me and shrugged: maybe, maybe not. Then he apologized in case the bowman seemed a bit sleepy. Late night with the girlfriend.

  At that moment, an astonishing thick shape sucked a section of water down around my fly and I hooked a salmon. My reel screeched at the first run and then with wonderful power as the fish vaulted high over the surface of the pool. I got my fingers inside the arbor of my reel to slow things down, though it was clear the fish wasn’t going to be entirely under control for some time. Another jump, this one sideways in a real rip. Without my noticing, the killick had been weighed and now Wesley was slipping us over to the gravel bar opposite the pool. I got out to fight the fish while Wesley readied the net and Jeff slid the canoe ashore. Then the fish jumped again and broke the leader. Wesley walked over to me, looked at my straight rod. For a moment all was silent. Then he asked, quite coolly I thought, “What happened?”

  Now he wanted to examine my tackle. The leader, a finely tapered thing, he actively disliked. I buried my own views of leaders and took one of his, tied on another fly, and began fishing the drop below the one where the salmon, a big salmon, had taken my fly. I knew how it was. The next take could be a week away. There was a cavernous silence in the canoe. I resumed my methodical fishing of the drop, cast, lengthen, cast, lengthen. The waterspeed was picking up lower in the pool and required more careful mending of the line. I kept seeing the fish in the air, hearing the erratic screech of the reel, feeling that slump as the dead rod straightened.

  But then I hooked another fish, a hard-running ocean-bright fish, and this one, after several wonderful leaps, ended up in Wesley’s net, a big deep-hanging silver arc. With a wide smile that confirmed my absolution, Wesley said, “A fresh one, right from the garden!”

  We bounced along the river toward camp, tall ferns thrust through the gunwales to announce our fish. When we landed, Wesley shook my hand and said he’d see me in the morning. “You can’t leave us now,” he told me. “We’re well acquainted from fighting the salmon together!”

  I headed back up through the banks of wild strawberries considering a nap, the river poems of Michael Drayton, considering the notion that no one owed me anything.

  Sur

  ABOUT THE TIME the Administration decided that the problem with our economy was all these welfare recipients, I decided it was a sovereign time to go trout fishing in Argentina. The long flight south was half empty, and in order to avoid the in-flight movie, I tried to read the pile of magazines I’d bought at the airport which, whatever their subject, had a movie star on the cover and inside culture, politics, and sports, in pellet form. Reaching into my “hospitality kit” past the little elastic stockings and mouthwash, I produced the eyeshade which, pulled over my head, must have made me look, like the other passengers, as though I was facing a firing squad. Contemplating the rivers that drain the Andes—the Andes!—I quickly slipped off into a pleasant sleep while my feet swelled and my body dehydrated without me, the elastic of the eyeshade embedded in my hair and the soundless film, a stylish getaway item with perky bankables, played on. On a night flight, much is left in the form of the long vapor trails that follow the aircraft in the darkness: imperfect dreams, vanished childhoods, the residue of souls. The envoy, the coke whore, and the basketball player in the Japanese league alike fly from country to country on this basis alone, sharing an armrest, taking only that portion of the overhead bins to which they are really entitled.

  Some time later I tottered into the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires and in a kind of twilight zone turned on the television set and watched a documentary about a black rock ’n’ roll band from Oakland, I think. I tuned in too late to get the name of the band but dully marveled at their apocalyptic music and hyper-athletic antics. Halfway through this thing, the band did an extended “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” with my contemporaries, the Rolling Stones. I looked on in startled gloom as a rickety and wooden Keith Richards tried to stay out of the way of these rocketing negroes. Jagger showed less mother wit in attempting to hold his own with the lead singer, who filled the air around him with chaotic energy. After singing his part of the chorus, Jagger tried to steal away in his patented “Little Red Rooster” strut, yet managed only a melancholy impression of a formaldehyde-injected yard chicken on its very last legs. I watched with subdued dread as Mick and the gang tried to find someplace on the stage to be safe from these exploding rhythm meatballs from California. I knew I was jet-lagged, but it seemed I was witnessing Whitey eat dust as the Third World thundered past. I wondered if this was behind the Administration’s fear of welfare recipients, the sense that by hoarding all the items on the Keynesian wish list, we had let Others make off with the things that actually mattered.

  By the time I got to the Plaza San Martin, I had my feet under me but was in something of a cloud. Assailed by fishing memories, I sat on a park bench near the memorial to the fallen of the Falklands War, listening to a local fundamentalist harangue the crowd as he walked back and forth with his Bible open in one hand, pulling the collar of his boiled shirt away from his sweating neck with the other. I hadn’t known they had guys like him down here. Squads of vivid, provocative females were pouring into the park for a sort of evening paseo. Buenos Aires is known for this, but still it was a shock. I’d flown all night long, napped at the plaza, made a late-afternoon visit to the Basilica de Santissimo Sacramento to think about several people who are gone, and now I dazedly occupied a park bench while this bone-rattling parade of Argentine women passed before me and briefly displaced my preoccupation with sea-run brown trout at the foot of the southernmost Andes where I would be tomorrow. What sort of man would these beauties of the Southern Cross consort with? Well, though I’d been enveloped by their colognes as I made my way down the sidewalk, smirking at their Versace knockoffs, the men were more than presentable, and no middle-aged trouter from the States was going to change the bal
ance of power by merely showing up in the plaza. I had a better chance of snagging my waders than a comely dinner companion, and so I returned to my room and slept quietly with my fly rods until it was time to head back to the airport for the trip to Tierra del Fuego.

  The Argentines have a refreshing lack of reverence for the wonders of modern transportation and wandered the aisle of the 727 with rowdy enthusiasm. We stopped at Río Gallegos, the scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s last bank robbery, then at my destination, Ciudad Río Grande. Each time the plane touched down, the Argentines leapt to their feet and, braced in the lurching aisle, flung open the overhead bins in a cascade of sweaters, wine bottles, birdcages, groceries, diapers, and Styrofoam coolers. When I got off the plane and looked around, I thought I was home in Montana as flakes of sparse snow blew across the sere landscape.